Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979)

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Herbert Marcuse came of age during World War I and served in the German Army. Becoming disillusioned with the internal politics of the military, he began pursuit of an academic career. After receiving his doctorate, Marcuse began a habilitation under Martin Heidegger, the preeminent German philosopher of that era. However, Marcuse left Freiburg in 1933 (largely due to Heidegger's affiliation with the National Socialist Party) and joined the Institut fur Sozialforschung, now frequently referred to as the Frankfurt school, where he developed enduring professional relationships with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Marcuse fled Germany in 1934 and immigrated to the United States. He took a hiatus from scholarship in the 1940s and early 1950s, working for both the Office of Secret Services and the U.S. State Department, in what, ostensibly, was an effort to directly contribute to the struggle against fascism. Following his service, Marcuse wrote the first of his major works, Eros and Civilization (1955), followed by One-Dimensional Man (1964) and The Aesthetic Dimension (1979). In this later period of his career, Marcuse tended to synthesize Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxian structural analysis. His most important contributions to consumption theory include the concepts of surplus repression, repressive de-sublimation, and one-dimensional society, which are explained below.

Marcuse believed that humans are first and foremost motivated by the pursuit of pleasure. Like Sigmund Freud, Marcuse viewed this “pleasure principle” as potentially dangerous because, in a world of scarcity, survival often depends on our ability to sacrifice immediate desires for the sake of our long-term best interests. And because nature leaves so many of our desires unfilled, Marcuse argued that repression and alienation are basic aspects of human social life. The raison d’être of society is to help individuals fulfill all the natural desires that we would be unable to meet if left in isolation. However, society can only [Page 885]extend human productivity by systematically forcing its constituents to toil (a term that Marcuse uses to designate labor that is both sublimated and alienated).

Even though the productive capacities of industrialized nations have come to far exceed that which is necessary to meet all of the basic needs of their constituents, workers in these nations find themselves toiling not less (as we would assume, since toil is no longer justified by society's original purpose of generating sufficient resources to satisfy the basic instinctual needs of its constituents) but more. This toil in excess of what is required to meet basic instinctual needs is what Marcuse terms surplus repression.

In essence, Marcuse argues that capitalism has become a social pathology, supplanting the historical purpose of society with its own logic of perpetual market expansion. To support and justify its continued growth (and the maintenance of extraordinary social repression, which such growth requires), capitalism must penetrate the psyche of each individual to produce novel needs and desires that it can subsequently fulfill. Thus, in late capitalism, the modus operandi of industry is to facilitate expanded production through the control and organization of consumption.

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